Haven’t done one of these in a while…
• In the UK, where the general election campaign is under way, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls has infuriated northern England by suggesting a Labour government might not build HS2. He wants to build from London to Birmingham, but maybe not to Liverpool and beyond, instead focusing on a possible route to Manchester and Leeds – which is technically known as HS3. Balls’s comments have been condemned by the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, and the Scottish National Party.
• In Texas there is the familiar debate over where to put HSR infrastructure. Residents of Houston’s First Ward are not happy about the proposed route of the Texas Central project. One resident has an interesting op-ed in the Houston Chronicle arguing for putting the HSR station further out from the downtown core so as to preserve the right-of-way for local light rail. It’s an interesting point he makes, though I don’t know nearly enough about the Texas HSR project to say whether he’s right or not. It is another reminder that it doesn’t matter whether HSR is backed by public or private money, the opposition it encounters is the same.
• China is reportedly planning to invest $5 billion in a proposed Russian high speed train from Moscow to Kazan via Nizhny Novgorod, cutting the travel time from end to end from 14 hours to 3.5 hours. China is also apparently considering funding HSR from Moscow to Beijing via Kazakhstan, which might sound extremely ambitious were it not for the fact that China has already built a lot of long-distance HSR infrastructure.
